Man About Town: A lighter version of 'No Exit' for Savannah

The Collective Face is presenting a production of Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit" with Michael Knowles as The Bellhop, Alexis Mundy as Inez Serrano, Maggie Lee Hart as Estelle Delaunay and Matt O'Boyle as Vincent Cradeau.

The Collective Face is presenting a production of Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit" with Michael Knowles as The Bellhop, Alexis Mundy as Inez Serrano, Maggie Lee Hart as Estelle Delaunay and Matt O'Boyle as Vincent Cradeau.

When starting a new project, director David Poole always asks, “Why are we doing this play now?”

That seems an especially relevant question for The Collective Face Theatre Ensemble’s production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit,” which runs for the next two weekends at Muse Arts Warehouse on Louisville Road.

The existentialist play — first performed in Paris during the final months of Nazi control — deals with three characters who are escorted by a valet into a windowless room from which there is literally no exit. Ever.

The play’s theme of humans creating our own hell is a staple of existentialist literature, but Poole told me recently that The Collective Face production also considers the more modern issue of “how voyeuristic we are as a society.”

That theme is explored largely through the character of the valet, who is able to watch the unsuspecting prisoners whose lives are now laid bare. That makes the play a comment on the pervasiveness of technology in shaping our world.

And if all that sounds pretty heavy, Poole hopes that won’t deter anyone from checking out the play.

“It’s an absurdist piece, so it’s funny,” Poole emphasized. “If you make it a drama, it can be very long. We have tried to play up the comedy.”

And Poole has chosen a translation of “No Exit” (originally “Huis Clos” in French) by Paul Bowles. Poole thinks that this translation is “lighter” and “more digestible” than the one most commonly performed.

Writing in the New York Times in 1948, Bowles called “No Exit” a “modern morality play” — “We can be saved, but only by ourselves — by looking straight at our own weaknesses so that we know them through and through.”